Fighting Irish football has landed its 16th recruit from the class of 2017 today, as defensive tackle Darnell Ewell has verbally committed to Notre Dame. The 247 Composite ranks the 6’4″/295-pounder out of Norfolk, Virginia as the #144 player overall and the #9 defensive tackle in the country.
This commitment comes as no surprise to those who closely follow recruiting. But if you had told just about anybody a couple of months ago that the Irish would land Ewell, they’d probably call you crazy. At that time, Notre Dame was running around 5th place in his recruitment, with Ohio State holding a huge lead. However, after a June visit to South Bend, the Irish really started to gain steam in Ewell’s recruitment.
Breaking: 2017 four-star DL Darnell Ewell talks commitment to #NotreDame. https://t.co/wopxNLskeL pic.twitter.com/7F8u1o7xMW
— Matt Freeman (@mattfreemanISD) July 15, 2016
Oh, and Ohio State reportedly running out of room for defensive tackles probably also helped a bit as well.
Recruiting Service Rankings
247 — 4 star (92 rating), #182 overall, #8 DT, #6 in VA
Rivals — 4 star (5.9 rating), #125 overall, #8 DT, NR in VA
Scout — 4 star, #149 overall, #8 OG, #5 in VA
ESPN — 4 star (82 rating), #182 overall, #12 OG, #4 in VA
247 Composite — 4 star (.9364), #144 overall, #9 DT, #4 in VA
Cohort
Darnell chose the Irish over other offers from Ohio State, Alabama, Michigan, Clemson, Auburn, Florida State, Florida, LSU, Stanford, and many others. His offer list totals 32 teams right now.
Highlights
Darnell’s tape shows a kid with a lot of the qualities you look for in a defensive lineman — power, explosiveness, and the ability to shed blocks. You can see him both pushing the opposition back and holding his ground to keep the hole closed, waiting for the right time to shed the block. He seems to understand the position pretty well and also seems to be a pretty good athlete.
You can, however, also see some things he needs to work on. I noticed he has a tendency to play high sometimes, which allows offensive linemen the leverage to get up in his chest. It hasn’t been a problem for him at the high school level because he’s stronger and more athletic than most of the opposition, but that is something that definitely needs to be shored up.
(Also, I recommend you pay attention to the offensive backfield around the 4:50 mark. That lead blocker is huge — has to be at least 350 pounds!)
Impact
This is a pretty big pickup for Notre Dame. Landing a composite Top 150 guy at defensive tackle (where they haven’t landed a lot of Top 150 guys recently) is a pretty big deal right now. It’s also nice to get a guy out of Virginia. That’s a state that hasn’t been recruited particularly well in recent years, and this could hopefully help Notre Dame get where they want to be with recruiting in that area.
With two defensive tackles committed now (Kurt Hinish committed shortly after March Junior Day), this also likely closes out that position’s recruiting for this cycle (sorry, Dalyn Wade-Perry).
Ewell already has the physical stature necessary to play Division I football. He’s strong, he’s got good length at 6’4″, and he looks to be in good shape at 295 pounds. Those physical characteristics, coupled with the current quality at defensive tackle being a huge unknown at this point, could allow Darnell to see the field very early. It will likely all depend on how well he adjusts to playing at the college level.
Welcome to the Irish family, Darnell!
BOOM. Great write up, Tyler. Love this commitment, I think he has similar upside to Jarron Jones. Absolutely yuuuge.
Also, on the Virginia point – Tyler, Eric, and I were discussing this behind the scenes the other day. Not only has Virginia been relatively barren for us over the years (with apologies to CJ Prosise, Greer Martini, and Doug Randolph), but the Hampton Roads area in particular has been nearly unrepresented in the all-time roster. Ewell would be only the seventh Hampton Roads player in Irish history, and the first since Carlos Campbell and Isaiah Gardner in 2004.
Virginia has definitely been growing as a recruiting hotbed over the last few years, so this is a big commitment on several levels.
Hampton Roads has been dominated by VA Tech for so long. I wonder if Beamer’s retirement is going to open it back up for the rest of the country.
Readers,
New comments will now be highlighted in blue. In order to add this key feature we had to lose some others such as unlimited nesting, no more up or down voting, and no more automatic conversion of pics/GIFs.
Use these codes to help you! You can always go to our Site Rules page for this info.
Where’s sarcasm?
Also, thanks for doing this. Much better to have the new comments marked.
***HTML GEEK WARNING***
Now that you’ve been warned… I know you were joking, but… There is actually a pretty easy way to do it using the “pre” tag, like so:
With Brendan’s help the codes have been improved and updated!
Hopefully you’ll be able to get those features back at some point, but marking new comments is indeed more important, at least in my opinion.
And there was much rejoicing
(Paraphrasing because my memory isn’t THAT good…)
“The situation was indeed dire, but just as our heroes thought they were about to beaten the illustrator had a massive heart attack and died. And there was much rejoicing.”
Virtual thumbs-up for the Monty Python reference. You know how to get on my good side.
If I could upvote this news, I would. I much prefer the easier reading experience of marked new posts, though. Easy trade to make. Thanks.
This also puts ND at #4 in the 247 Composite recruiting class rankings, fyi
Really!?!?!
Man need to get the Noice Gif to work
I give up………for now
via GIPHY
That’s super creepy. I don’t want to turn my back on that guy.
Just saw this in a local article about him – there are two players from his school at OSU right now. There is some reputable buzz out there that OSU hd told him they were full, but more recently came back after him. Didn’t matter, he felt it at ND. He says he’s shutting it down completely.
Great kid. National Honor Society and JROTC on top of being a two-time All State player. He’s an ND kid.
Nice to be here and see some familiar faces.
And by the way, I’m going to the ND/Michigan State game this year. I’m sitting in the south end zone, and we’ve never lost a game when I’ve sat there (at least 3-0 that I can recall).
Go Irish!
Great to see you here cubsfan!
i saw some classic Holtzian blowouts from the south end zone…hope you will for this one!
Well, that didn’t work so well . . .
Here’ the image I was trying to post:
*Here’s
Wait! I’ve been practicing! Let’s see:
*All the angry Samuel L. Jackson gifs*
You need to take a screen shot or something so I can see what you’re doing (wrong).
Here’s me about to try to post a picture using the Site Rules above:
And here’s a link to a screen capture of what I typed:
Hmm… Seems like it should work. Let me try:
And now let me try with my shadowy alter-ego account, cleverly named Brendan2… What I’m trying to do here is see if permission level has anything to do with it, since my main account is an “Author” and my Brendan2 account is a “Participant.” If you were curious…
Heads up for this week, guys. Slot receiver Michael Young should be making a decision on Wednesday.
Or something easier…
Wait, are you now saying that we just paste in the link like this:
and it works?
Awesome! Who should I thank for this technological breakthrough, Brandon R or Brandon 2?
Well, you could thank either of them but neither is on this site, so…
[bitterly decries the rise of Beverly Hills 90210 and the pursuant explosion of “Brandon”]
What can I say?
Old OFD jokes die hard.
OK, if you’re following the discussion here between A to the J, CSN, Eric, and me about this stuff, I’m taking the conversation over to the Michael Young commitment post with some good updates. Please follow along there. https://18stripes.com/recruiting-michael-young-commits-nd/#comment
Thanks!
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